I’ve met many here in California who think that all good things can be had in our Golden State, where the magic of fresh and local and seasonal cooking is strongest. They’re wrong. Just five years after Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, a similar restaurant opened in chilly Madison, Wisconsin, called L’Etoile. Just as Waters’ mantra was

I present to you: mocetta. It was my first-ever dry-cured ham, and it does not come from a pig. Mocetta (MOE-chet-uh) is a Northern Italian air-dried goat ham that works well with venison, too. I wish I could tell you I have an old recipe handed down by the nonnas from Alto Adige, but that’d

I was awash in pork fat this past weekend. In the past few days I have made two types of bacon, a dry cured wild boar salami, more than six pounds of lardo — cured back fat — not to mention a gallon of fresh rendered lard. I blame John Bledsoe. Bledsoe is the local

Coppa di testa. In France it is Fromage de tete. In England, it’s called brawn. All decent enough names; but they don’t translate well. At some point in the past, our ancestors decided to forgo the muscular moniker brawn for a direct translation of the French word for this fascinating cold cut — and by

This is a story about a strange gift, an unusual challenge, and three very old, very ornery roosters. And as you may well guess, it ends badly for the roosters. To a point. I have become something of our Italian neighbors’ personal rooster assassin. I killed my first two years ago, and have returned at